Fall or Fly. Wendy Welch
did I know that would be a way of life—but what I most remember was how bright pink he was. I thought, “The pink panther!”
I was so excited to hold him but still really cautious of getting attached for fear of the mom changing her mind. She actually was holding him and feeding him quite often. I remember seeing that and thinking, I knew this was too good to be true! She is going to change her mind!
But she didn’t, thankfully. I had a lawyer there with the legal papers. If we hadn’t been there, Social Services would have taken him due to the drugs. When our son was born, they found in her system THC (which is Pot), Meth, Cocaine, and LSD. And that’s how I got my son.
—adoption dad
THE ROAD from fostering to adoption can be an arduous journey. It’s not surprising that some find the yo-yo activity of courtroom appearances and parental-rights visits excruciating and hunt for ways around it, as Hutton’s parents did. Others have that decision thrust upon them.
While Coalton isn’t big on expensive private adoptions, it has a fast-track equivalent often found in rural areas: the hand-picked mom.1 These private-but-mostly-unpaid transactions stem from parents who know they won’t be allowed (or don’t want) to keep their babies; often the birth mom or her mother will choose someone they know to raise the infant in question. Based on interviews, the most common reasons for a birth mom’s willingness to give up her child here in Coalton are substance abuse and illness—usually cancer. In third place comes Mom’s need to finish college, and behind that, her new boyfriend’s refusing to raise another man’s kid. Children caught in the crossfire of this last situation are more often of elementary-school age than infants.
Being singled out for such an honor-cum-responsibility as raising your blood relation’s child pretty much bypasses the state system’s fostering plan and goes straight to “adopt,” yet it is fraught with social peril. The new parents may wind up entangled in a long-term and ill-defined relationship with people they probably know well and see on weekends—at church or in the local elementary school, since these adoptions are often in rural communities. While moms seeking a good parent usually turn first to their own sisters, mothers, or mothers-in-law, they don’t have to. Mom may also not be the one pulling the decision strings.
Appropriate relatives asked to take the baby may be eligible for assistance under KinCare. This program goes under different names in different states, but it’s the DSS family-first plan. Extended family foster the child while Mom (or sometimes Dad) gets it together. During this time, the child is not eligible for adoption. If Mom doesn’t mention members of her extended family when her children are taken, social workers try to track them down. Relatives who wind up overlooked during that hunt are eligible to bring litigation when termination of rights comes up, so it’s in the best interest of the state to find them if Mom doesn’t offer names.
One of the reasons that handpicked adoptions can get messy is their degree of informality. Another is how much harder it becomes to push a birth mom away or curtail her rights by court order when she’s the one who gave you the child. Coalton is a region fueled by a dying coal industry and a thriving kinship system, a place where at least some of the extended family are likely to live in the same vicinity. Coal isn’t king here; family is. A judge may say it’s okay for you not to let the bio mom see her child once she’s signed him over to you, but the community never will. And if the community includes her extended family, which it probably does, God help you when you bump into one of the home team at the gas station or grocery store, because they’re going to say something. Probably in a carrying tone of voice.
Hutton’s wife, Kim, was adopted by her birth mother’s boyfriend’s sister. Birth mother Kristin moved in with a guy—call him Jim—who didn’t want another man’s kids. Kristin “gave” her oldest daughter, Janice, to her grandmother and three-year-old Kim to Jim’s sister, Annette. (Annette and her husband would have taken Janice as well, but she had a different dad, and he wouldn’t let anyone but his former wife’s mother have her.) Kim’s dad was nowhere to be found, so boyfriend Jim signed the termination papers as her bio father. Which probably made the whole adoption illegal, but who was watching?
Appalachian kinship systems are complex, but Kim’s adoption staggered even the clan within which it happened; the whole extended family on both sides lived within twenty miles of one another in a community sprawled across a back holler (the regional term for a mountain hollow, or cove). Kim and Janice even attended the same church as their birth mom for a while—until Kim grew old enough to ask questions. Kim grew up knowing that her sister lived nearby but never got together with her outside of church, which she stopped attending when she was “maybe five or six.”
To avoid confusion, references to Kim’s mom from here forward mean Annette, her aunt-by-marriage. (Jim and Kristin married a few years later.) Her birth mother will be called Kristin. The arrangement between the two women was a handshake; Annette received no money via KinCare. The formal adoption flew through uncontested; use of the legal system remained minimal, or someone might have cried foul on Jim’s signature as birth dad and questioned the “agreement” Annette and Kristin drew up regarding visitation rights.
Although Kim’s mom had signed a document written by Kristin stipulating she could come see Kim on a regular basis, Annette began to find ways to prevent these meetings. Because the agreement was less legal than a gesture of good faith between them, both sisters-in-law stretched its nonbinding language until it broke. Ties were cut by the time Kim started school.
Without a state stipend, her mom sent Kim to the county elementary school in designer clothes, had her hair professionally cut and styled, and enrolled her in dance lessons—which Kim hated. Part of the tension that developed between the women may have stemmed from their different economic classes. Annette’s husband, Rick, was career military; Annette was a teacher. For whatever reason, her mom didn’t want Kim associating with Kristin and Jim (no fixed source of income) as she grew up.
But Kim had questions and a wound that wouldn’t heal. “Why did she want to get rid of me? Why was I not good enough for her? How come she handed me off and ran away? I really, really wanted to know why she gave me up without a fight.”
Yearning to know why blotted out the sun in her world, gnawed the strength from her bones, and destroyed her self-identity. Kim managed to keep the anger bottled inside until need met opportunity one winter weekend when she was visiting her grandmother.
Spending a few days with Mamaw was not unusual for Kim if her parents went out of town. Don’t confuse Mamaw with Kim’s maternal grandmother, who raised her older sister, Janice. The family called that woman Grandma. Mamaw was Annette’s mother. As readers have already worked out, that also makes her the mother of Kristin’s boyfriend-turned-husband, Jim—the guy who didn’t want Kim and her sister around. Such an inconvenient detail not only complicates the story but invites the inbreeding jokes for which Coalton residents have no patience.
It is perhaps easier to turn pain into humor at the expense of others than to consider the implications of Kim’s stepfather’s sister also being her mother, the stepfather being the reason she couldn’t live at home, or his mother’s being the babysitter of choice, when Grandma-by-blood sat eight miles away with Kim’s older sister, Janice, in her home.
One fateful weekend while staying with Mamaw, Kim just up and asked her to call and see if Kristin and Jim could come over.
“I don’t know if Mamaw was surprised. She’d didn’t act like it. She’d raised two generations of teenagers [including Jim’s daughter from another relationship] by then, so maybe not. Not much phased that woman, I have to say. She just picked up the phone and called them, and they said they’d come over.”
Understandably nervous, Kim tried to calm herself: It’s not like you’ve never seen them before. You’ve talked to them plenty at funerals and weddings. But this time, she would be able to ask The Question without extended family hanging about, eavesdropping and reporting back to Annette. Kim knew her mother wouldn’t like what was about to happen and didn’t want to hurt the woman who had raised her.
Mamaw